Kakunupmawa, the Sun, is among the most powerful of the Chumash sky people. The ethnographies recorded by John P. Harrington describe him as an old man, a widower living in the upper world with his two daughters, who each day carries a torch of rolled bark across the sky to give the world its light. His name was understood in the sacred language as the radiance of the child born at the winter solstice, and the great winter-solstice observance was held in his honour to coax him to begin his northward return so that warmth and the growing season might come back. Every night the Sun and his partner Golden Eagle play the gambling game of peon against Sky Coyote and Morning Star; the running score, settled at the winter solstice, determines whether the coming year will bring rain and abundance or famine and death.